I only have 2 pages myself. Too lazy to see how many posts per page I have my settings at. Mine is set to 100 posts. Also, it seems the compact header eats the pages.

---Febreze (and other air fresheners actually) is just below perfumes/colognes, and that's just below dead skunks in terms of smells that offend my nose.MiquelFire.red | +MeWindows 8 is a toned, stylish, polished professional athlete. But it’s wearing clown makeup, and that creates a serious image problem. ~PCWorld Article

Today I was seeing how much longer a goal in an MMO, RuneScape, I play would take. I kill a particular monster over and over (that's pretty all I do on the game, actually...). I'd like to get some of my stats (defence/constitution/magic/range) to the "max virtual level" and also get the max xp possible in another (summoning). Pretty pointless, actually...

But anyway, I'd have to kill ~47,000 more of this particular monster. I'd say I'm probably one of the most talented RuneScapers when it comes to efficiently killing said monster, but it would take me at least 300 hours... Assuming I play 2 hours a week (which would actually be above average), that would be just around three years.

To cut to the chase, will this thread be open in three years? Better yet, will the internet as we know it exist in three years ?

Who knows.

(But I wouldn't be surprised if season 7 of Game of Thrones will be airing and while The Winds of Winter will still be but a dream...).

---ItsyRealm, a 3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a cute medieval world with horrors unimaginable.

But anyway, I'd have to kill ~47,000 more of this particular monster. I'd say I'm probably one of the most talented RuneScapers when it comes to efficiently killing said monster, but it would take me at least 300 hours... Assuming I play 2 hours a week (which would actually be above average), that would be just around three years.

Somehow... my 50 hours in Skyrim so far feel a thousand times more productive than that.

It's basically a novel... or series of novels... in game form. You enter a town and feel immediately overwhelmed because just talking to everyone and GETTING all the quests will probably take an hour.

But if you need that kind of deep escapism, man, it really fits the bill and I'm thankful one company bothers to make games like that. I've seen a few indie games make a mechanical depth like that, e.g. Dwarf Fortress, but certainly never a game that was a polished modern 3-D experience AND that insane amount of lore and gameplay variety/depth.

And with the insane level of modding support, and huge mod community, people have really fixed many of the problems with the game and help you tune it to "your own game" in major ways. People have customized literally everything in the game and replaced major modules There's a Thief 2: Metal Age mod that adds blackjack/knockouts, water, fire and even rope arrows, and more. I'm going to try that out after I beat it.

The mod community spends tens of thousands of man-hours into improving and adding to the game. I'm blown away. Most "good" mods have over 2,000 man-hours in them. I can't imagine putting that much effort into a mod. I mean, could you imagine how insane it would be to have that many people, that dedicated, to adding to YOUR game? That would be such an honor.

-----sig:“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Somehow... my 50 hours in Skyrim so far feel a thousand times more productive than that.

I've spent over 100x as long playing RuneScape (i.e., over 5000 hours) since I started playing around later summer of 2004. A lot of that was spent multitasking, admittedly, on more AFK things (e.g., training a skill while programming--I learned to program while playing RuneScape, haha).

The monster I kill (Tormented Demons) is more like meditation/relaxing than actually doing anything productive. Pretty much a way to pass time when there's nothing else I can/will do. Otherwise I would probably be staring at a wall or something even less productive... At least I'm working towards some virtual goal, I suppose, that can be tracked and has an end.

It seems the good parts of RuneScape have waned, though. It had some of the best quests and storylines of any MMO (well, in my opinion) all the way back in 2004, but lately quests have gotten more predictable and less diverse. "While Guthix Sleeps" and "Ritual of the Mahjarrat" were simply amazing--worthy of games on their own--and older quests like "Underground Pass" had flaws but were still great...

Oh well. The portions of the game I stick to are still pretty neat, and if I had more patience/time I'd enjoy other aspects of it yet still (some of the newer quests are locked behind various requirements I can't be bothered to obtain).

Like I said, a play a few hours a week at most nowadays. Sometimes I regain interest and spend a couple hours a day, but that's not so common anymore.

---ItsyRealm, a 3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a cute medieval world with horrors unimaginable.

I enjoyed the free parts of Runescape back in the day. I actually got to level 30 or something at one point. No clue if my account still exists. I think I went by something like "seffir auth" or something like that on my latest account. The game was always a subscription trap though. I don't know who can afford those fees, but it isn't me (I have no idea what it costs today). Most of the time you were just painfully grinding collecting resources, crafting, selling, and on and on... It required way too much time to make progress and nothing was ever particularly interesting. It was a nice way to kill time between classes back in the mid 00's though.

The game was always a subscription trap though. I don't know who can afford those fees

It was $5 a month when I started paying in 2005 (I still pay $5 because of grandfathered rates). That's $60 a year, which is the price of a standard console game. The rate is higher now ($90 a year or $9.49 a month). Nowadays you can use in-game money to buy bonds (from players who spent real-life money on said bonds), so technically you don't have to pay real-life money anymore, just in-game time .

(It's 24 bonds for a year of membership, and bonds are currently 12m gp per, so 288m gp in total. I make... 7m gp/hr at Tormented Demons on average [since the drops are RNG, but common enough to allow for a nice average like that in a reasonable time], so ~40 hours of moneymaking in game. Though even here in USAland normal membership rate of $90 a year would take 13 hours of a minimum wage job, making the in-game method more expensive by proxy...)

---ItsyRealm, a 3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a cute medieval world with horrors unimaginable.

Wow. I can't imagine how that would ever be sustainable from a business standpoint...

A player has to buy the bonds and sell them to another player though, that's why it's still profitable . It's actually more profitable; the 24 bonds gives Jagex (the RuneScape developer) $143.76, while a year of membership is at most $113.88 (and as low as $60, assuming you have grandfathered rates). So Bob buys 5 bonds for $30 and sells them to random players for 60m gp, random players use bonds for membership without using real life money, and still Jagex comes out ahead.

---ItsyRealm, a 3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a cute medieval world with horrors unimaginable.

The post will mostly be gone by the time some of you even read this, but let it be known that this thread has gotten spam!

[edit] Actually, I'm wondering how the site handle new user profiles, as I noticed that the post doesn't appear in their profile.

---Febreze (and other air fresheners actually) is just below perfumes/colognes, and that's just below dead skunks in terms of smells that offend my nose.MiquelFire.red | +MeWindows 8 is a toned, stylish, polished professional athlete. But it’s wearing clown makeup, and that creates a serious image problem. ~PCWorld Article

It seems a tad suspicious that this thread ... of all threads, would be where spam was posted. Maybe it's a sockpuppet account and contains a coded message. I've made only a minimalistic attempt to decipher it, but if we treat 233 2316 803 10 as a sequence of unicode characters, in hex, we get E9 90C 323 A, which gives us "éऌ ̣◙" (the last character is actually a linefeed, but I used the codepage 437 equivalent).